A Craft Cocktail Blog for the Home Bartender that Focuses on Original Creations Drawn from Culinary Inspiration.

Tag Archives: toddy

To be honest, I don’t have that much to say about this. Is a hot chocolate a hot toddy? It’s one of those wacky philosophy questions; irrelevant, precious, and decadent, like the Gettier Problem. I made this drink by request, since after Johan made his chocolate entremet, he had a big bowl of leftover sour cream dulcey chocolate mousse, and let’s be real, the cocoa bean is his dark master.

To make the chocolate base, we used whole non-homogenized jersey milk, and melted in chopped up feuves of Valrhona Araguani 72% and Valrhona Caramellia. To the chocolate base we added Frangelico, George Dickel Rye, and Angostura bitters. For garnish, we used a dollop of sour cream mousse, which Johan describes in pain-staking detail.

Note: While you read this post, please bask in the glow of this early 2000s pop smash, Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child.

I know, I just did a Buddha’s Hand Cocktail, but then I realized I had an opportunity to make a drink with the best name in the history of my blog.

In last week’s post, I tried to capitalize on a complex harmony between dill, citrus, salmon, and aquavit. For this hot toddy, I wanted to get back to the essence of the Buddha’s Hand. At its heart, a hot toddy is pretty close to a classic punch, but with the “weak” element heated. Your classic punch is 1 part sour, 2 parts sweet, 3 parts strong, 4 parts weak. This is usually rendered as lime juice, simple syrup, rum, and water, but if you make that drink, it doesn’t feel quite right:

1-2-3-4 punch?
.5 oz lime
1 oz simple syrup
1.5 oz rum
2 oz water

After shaking with ice, you can expect your 3 oz cocktail to gain about 2 oz of water. Personally though, I prefer .75 oz of lime, and .5 oz of sugar, for a 1.5-1-3-4 sort of ratio. Well, times and tastes changes. Anyway, all of this is a long lead up to say that a classic punch is usually made with an oleo saccharum, and in this instance, the classic punch ratio ended up being perfect. Perhaps oleo saccharum isn’t as sweet as 1:1 simple syrup?

Please note that the rosemary above was completely decorative, sandwiched in between two separable glass pieces in the unique serving vessel that we found for this drink. A stemless cocktail glass sits snugly inside a glass bowl, insulated by a layer of air. Not only is this perfect for keeping your drink warm, but it has a bulbous shape that reminded me of a laughing Buddha. Of course, one of these Buddha Tiki Mugs would be even better.

As you will recall, the Buddha’s hand oleo from last week had some dill in it, but by the time I made this drink a couple days later, the dill flavor had mellowed substantially. I chose rye to further blur the flavor of dill in the drink, a job it did admirably owing to its pickley notes. Lemon flavor is similar enough to Buddha’s hand that it can play a supporting role, while leaving the oily fragrance of its lead to be the star.

This drink captured the flavor of Buddha’s hand with a lot of purity. In a way, it tasted like an idealized Buddha’s hand might, if only the fruit had flesh to go with its unctuous skin.

I got away from winter spices this week, which allowed us to focus on the core composition of this style. Hot Toddy Lesson Four: A toddy is a classic punch.

I could have sworn I had posted some variation of this drink before, but I could not find it, and that makes today your lucky day. I have been enjoying variations on this drink for years, and the combination of dark demerara rum and black coffee remains one of my all time favorites.

We’re still talking about hot toddies. One of my favorite things about this style is that it uses a bit more dilution than your standard shaken or stirred drink. A typical shaken cocktail gains between two and three oz of water, but I like my hot toddy with four to five, holding the total volume of spirits and modifiers between two and three oz, regardless.

The extra dilution lets you take a bigger swig, so you can really feel the warmth of the drink all the way into your belly. “Watery” isn’t always a bad thing, is what I’m trying to say, but in this drink, I like a toddy with a little more body.

A more basic version of this drink is garnished with a cinnamon stick, but since this is Measure and Stir, I decided to do something a little plus ultra. My friend Johan just bought a Polyscience smoking gun, and I’ve had this cloche lying around for ages, so we put two and two together. The cinnamon stick is there for the aroma, but if we set the cinnamon on fire, we can mobilize that aroma.

Moreover, there is something about black coffee, especially South American origins, that reminds me ever so vaguely of cigarettes. I don’t smoke cigarettes, and frankly, the smell makes me nauseous, but even so, I can see why they are considered such natural complements. Perhaps the subtle smokiness of some coffees is merely an artifact of the roasting process, (it can get pretty smoky inside a roaster), but to me, smoking the cinnamon plays on that same natural synergy.

Cinnamon-Smoked Coffee Toddy
1.5 oz Demerara Rum (El Dorado 12)
.25 oz Simple Syrup
4 oz of brewed black coffee, your favorite light-roasted single origin.
Build the drink in a large snifter and then place it under a cloche full of cinnamon smoke for 1 minute. Alternatively, build in a mug and garnish with a whole cinnamon stick.

As you can see, I brewed my coffee in a chemex, and I used natural process Panamanian beans from one of my favorite local roasters, Slate Coffee. I think every bartender, barista, and bon vivant should know how to make a good pour over.

With ingredients of this high quality, it’s important not to overload the drink. Complex coffee and rum provide more than enough intrigue for a drink like this, while the cinnamon aroma welcomes you in. The simplicity of this drink is a perfect way to illustrate:

Hot Toddy Lesson Two: Give your toddy some body by lengthening it with a flavorful liquid.

It’s getting cold again, and that means its time for my favorite family of mixed drinks: the hot toddy. What is a hot toddy, exactly? For me it’s a feeling you get when it’s rainy and cold outside, and you bring a glass of steaming, aqueous whiskey to your lips. When it’s done right, it warms you to your core.

And yet, the recipe is flexible. At its most essential, it consists of lemon, sugar, whiskey, and boiling water. That is a decent hot toddy all on its own, but it can be a bit plain. When I make it that way, I grate fresh cinnamon and nutmeg over the top, and garnish with a fatty orange peel.

Today, I wanted to do something a little different.

This is baseball-inspired hot toddy that I threw together on a whim. This follows my standard hot toddy formulation, which I will be expositing for you at some length over the next few posts.

We start with a base spirit, and I chose to use Bourbon, because it is the all-American choice. I wish I could say it went deeper than that.

In order to evoke the theme of baseball, I made a root beer syrup by boiling star anise, cloves, and sassafras in a syrup made with 1 cup of water, 3/4 cup of white sugar, and 1/2 cup of brown sugar. Brown sugar is not as sweet as white, but the syrup is still a little rich this way. I finished the syrup with citric acid, to balance the sweetness.

In order to evoke popcorn, I lengthened this drink with 옥수수차 (Oksusucha) — Korean roasted corn tea. It doesn’t taste quite like popcorn, but it hits the right notes and joins the bourbon’s corn flavors to the sassafras’ herbaceousness.

To finish it off, I rimmed the toasted peanuts, ground with salt and sugar to taste. I admit the rim was a little sloppy, but the oily peanut clumped in a way that was difficult to work with. Drying this powder out, either by letting it sit out uncovered, or (maybe? by mixing it with a bit of tapioca maltodextrin) would probably help it form a more consistent coating. Even so, it was delicious.

When the drink was still piping hot, it had a bland flavor and alcohol burn. Once it cooled down to a comfortable temperature, the flavor was a bit muddy on the sip, but with pleasant roasty corn notes that gave way to a medium-bodied root beer finish. As the drink cooled, it became a little too sweet.

Hot Toddy Lesson One: pay close attention to your serving temperature. There is a perfect window, and you need to find it.

I’d like to start this post with huge thanks to my friend Kian, for hooking me up with the sick lighting, camera work, and video editing. You, sir, are raising the bar. Also, thanks to my friend Troy for providing the music.

I think Tequila, chiles, and chocolate is a pretty classic pairing. There’s not too much to say about that. We all know that these flavors go well together — the fiery tequila compliments the fire from the chiles. I’ve tried making cold versions of this drink, but they were always lacking a certain ineffable quality. When the weather dropped below fifty degrees Fahrenheit (Water freezes at this temperature in San Diego), it occurred to me to warm up even more by serving this as a hot toddy.

If the name is confusing, say it out loud, like “Not ya Grandmother’s Toddy”. The joke isn’t funny if you explain it. I know. The hour is late so I’m going to make this a quick one.

James had the idea to have a small tea party, in which all of our drinks would contain tea. I was greatly enthused by the idea, and we set about brainstorming some different ideas. In the brainstorming phase I thought, “this ingredient is going to be a snap!” But it turns out that tea is very subtle, and there are many opportunities for the drink to go horribly wrong.

For our first drink we wanted to get some green tea in a glass with some hogo. The problem is that brewed tea has a very light flavor, and a tea syrup made in the usual way has a similarly light flavor. There was no way it was going to stand up to a high proof spirit! So the first thing I tried was brewing six cups of green tea, and then reducing it to roughly 2 cups. Making the reduction caused the tea to oxidize, and it lost both its green color and its grassy flavor.

In fact, it started to taste like a black tea, but not like a good one. So we dumped that. Fortunately, I had some matcha powder in my cabinet, and we were able to find a solution that was both flavorful and colorful.

If you want to get the flavor of green tea in a drink, matcha is your best friend. A brief green tea infusion in vodka, pisco, or gin is another way, but I think matcha delivers the boldest and truest flavor of green tea. It is very bitter, however, and not in a delicious fernet kind of way.

We ended up using cachaça instead of J. Wray, for it has a similar flavor, but it is not quite so pungent and overpowering. This is one of my favorite drinks to date, both in taste and appearance. I loved the sulfurous, vegetal funk of the cachaça against the grassy, floral tea, along with the bitter notes from the cocchi on the backend.

The presentation was inspired by this Orange Pisco Hot Chocolate from Serious Eats. By the way, here’s how to make matcha whipped cream: